20 ms·

YouTube: filmmakers presumed guilty until maybe proven innocent

469 points by relwin 5y ago

theknocker 5y ago
Alphabet is a pile of rancid shit run by morally bankrupt lunatics, and it is 100 times the problem Facebook ever dreamed of being, but we will never address this because the intelligentsia is full of brainwashed imbeciles who subsidize alphabet corporation in numerous ways including sending an army of insufferable hipster dumbfucks to upvote each other's posts about how acshually it's great that we live in a dystopia now.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ttctciyf 5y ago
In this version of the tragedy of the commons, the youtubers themselves are the resource headed for exhaustion. > the revised video had 5 new copyright claims even before upload processing was complete! Maybe there's an opportunity for an integrated offering of licensed music and lawyers to defend the licensee against bogus takedowns?
- golemotron 5y ago
  The fate of youtube has always been to become television. Countering the Tragedy of the Commons eventually raises the cost of creating and engaging with user-generated content relative to commercial content.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Those aren't claims, it's automatic Content ID. In this case YouTube has every right to prevent music from being uploaded and can prevent you from removing the Content ID claim, even when you have a license/it's in the public domain, because YT isn't abiding by or invoking the DMCA at all. It's like saying "guitar tryouts just don't play stairway to heaven" - you can forbid it even in the absence of AT&T sending a legal cease & desist your way.
bmitc 5y ago
It’s really scary what we’ve built on the Internet, and it’s even scarier that these corporations are able to go unchecked. Parts of life are already becoming miserable (e.g., automated “customer support”), and it’s just going to keep getting worse, all at the alter of growth and capitalism. I absolutely hate the argument used that scale prevents them to do anything about it, as if crimes en masse are suddenly okay. It’s their problem, not ours, that they’ve built systems that are, for all intents and purposes, uncontrollable. These corporations act like they are the victim in these cases of abuse of their platform.
- rexreed 5y ago
  I would venture that what we call capitalism these days isn't truly the capitalism of old. Rather, we're in some dystopian Corporatism future (corporatism vs capitalism) that aims to reduce choice, lock users in, and then treat those users as captive customers. It's no longer about providing a better or competitive product / service, but rather finding more ways to lock in users and eliminate choice. An acquisition by a FAANG is often a means to reduce choice instead of increase quality of a product or service.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    For over a hundred years people have described the tendency of a capitalist enterprise to concentrate wealth and power. There is no fine distinction between small diverse competitive capitalism and oligopoly, they are different stages of the life cycle. This is because small diverse enterprises proliferate at first in the growth stage and then winners start to emerge. When a crisis hits, the larger players snap up the bankrupt smaller players at bargain prices and get their best employees too. Over a series of crises, the market consolidates into oligopoly. Once the national market is nearly consumed, the remaining players look abroad to expand markets. There is nothing controversial about this, it is taught in business school. https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve This of course assumes a life cycle that starts domestically. Many ventures instead start abroad witnessing an opportunity to exploit cheap labor, lax regulations, or a unique natural resource. The western governments then assist the western companies in securing the opportunity, usually through gangster tactics. The resources are then extracted from the country, processed by the company into higher value goods, and resold to the originating country.
fencepost 5y ago
I do wonder if there's room for going after the people submitting false claims based on their libelous written claim to Google/YouTube that you're using unlicensed music. There's clearly a money trail to follow for identification.
- winternett 5y ago
  A lot of the time musicians sign themselves up to licensing services that create sub-agreements and some that don't even let the creators know that they have been licensed out to others. Then these artists stumble across their work in a project they didn't know about and report it out of confusion. There are also some gutless people out there who file the copyright claims for other negative purposes. Copyright has always been a huge mess though, and YouTube's method of making everyone compete for visibility certainly doesn't help it all. I only sign licensing agreements directly with the film makers I work with, and refuse to use 3rd party sites to handle my licensing in order to properly protect my work use rights though. The Internet can be a scary place to share personal work at times.
  - fencepost 5y ago
    In a situation like that a strike should be retracted after more detail is provided - and if it's not, then you have a conflict between someone who's properly licensed music and someone claiming they haven't. Being able to determine whether it's licensed seems like a problem for the musician. Put differently, if the only practical difference between properly licensing and failing to properly license is that you pay extra for doing it right but get no benefit from doing so, then why bother licensing? If the punishment happens either way, might as well save the money and hassle up front. Regardless of that, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of predatory claimants out there who've found a low barrier to entry, enough payout to make the effort worthwhile, and little to no repercussions for fraudulent claims. THAT's the problem that really needs to be addressed.
noasaservice 5y ago
Or what Google could do is auto-identify music in videos (they do this), and then set up automated monthly payments to the appropriate ASCAP or similar licensing body for statutory payments. We already have statutory public performance prices. And we started to adhere to them, the creators could get their money, and the creators could further create content. (You know, like a content Ponzi scheme.)
- hateful 5y ago
  Right? You upload and it says "this will cost $n per month to host it and you'll be charged starting next month via one of a few licensees you can select OR you can put in an existing license claim." Maybe each license can come with a UniqueId that you can fill in and it checks with an authority automatically.
  - noasaservice 5y ago
    Having done ASCAP fee schedules, the fees would be based on the amount of plays you've done. And you can pay per month, quarter, or estimated listeners in your area (for things like radio and broadcast). This is *simple*, and stays completely above ground with respect to copyright and mechanical reproductions. And it also allows the creators remixing content to ALSO make money. The hardest part is the ContentID that google already has. So it'd be keeping track of copyright owners, and paying. Sure, non-monetized videos would have to pay to keep them up. That could be a bummer... But it could be a definite choice to do. Monetized videos could just be paid directly out of the monetization bucket.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    And get this, you can host our ads in your product and select where they’ll be played. Any revenue generated from our ads will be passed on to you, less our commission!
- inetsee 5y ago
  Or Google could go to some effort to identify the individuals who are making a large number of false takedown claims, and block them from making claims?
jasode 5y ago
>From now on I will stay 100% with Vimeo but, as we know, they have a fraction of the viewership of You Tube – primarily because so few people know they even exist. Websurfer awareness is not the primary reason Vimeo has less viewership. The cause & effect before the buildup of awareness is the incentives that prevent content creators to upload videos to Vimeo in the first place: - platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads) - no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization without content creators asking audiences to pay for subscriptions. This financial model covers a wide variety of videos especially for unknown creators. The financial model of Vimeo is fine but its inherent costs will keep it smaller than Youtube because both the uploaders and the viewers don't want to pay. [1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade https://vimeo.com/upgrade
- stefan_ 5y ago
  The biggest of all being that Vimeo has essentially no discovery system? To a viewer, Vimeo is just a crude way to host a video.
  - amelius 5y ago
    As a viewer I want my discovery algorithm decoupled from who hosts my videos.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      The problem with that for creators is the information on who is watching what gets much poorer when that happens so the algorithm has much less to go off of so no one has really done it. Also how do you monetize that? The host will be the one inserting ads.
    - MikeTheGreat 5y ago
      Can I ask how that would work? Like, are you saying that you'd rather use Google to search for content (including videos) and then find the videos on whichever web site hosts that individual video? I do enjoy listening to music on YouTube and I actually like that it'll auto-enqueue music to play next that's similar to what I'm listening to now. You idea (I think) is really interesting - it's been a while since the web has worked that way and it's interesting to think about how combined hosting+discovery has changed it from the 'early days'
winternett 5y ago
As a music producer myself who makes music for film, I haven't had too many problems with use of my music in the work I do despite being distributed on all the usual major platforms. This is usually because content ID on YouTube gives credits and royalties to the original music creators, and most of my (remixed) uploads are not monetized once I publish them on YT. My distributer handles royalties for my all original music and pays me based on streams. I also make more money off spotify than YouTube even though I've been on YouTube for a lot longer than on Spotify... Overall though, the best comes from licensing my music in films outside of Internet platforms. I gave up caring long ago about gaining money from views, my most profitable upload was in 2015 when I filmed my parrot falling off my kitchen counter... That video likely succeeded because it wasn't something that would provide me residual success that overshadowed YouTube's normal (controlled) revenue pipelines. I do however mysteriously get my own music blocked frequently on uploads to TikTok, and there is only complete and demoralizing frustration in trying to report the issue, because they don't care about small creators like me because we don't make them enough money probably.... TikTok and many social platforms keep support only as an afterthought, and finding the right place to get problems solved on most platforms is damn near impossible. The social media creator economy is dismal and highly competitive for musicians and film makers right now. One of the biggest copyright issues is people who completely hijack and fake "original content" as their own in order to get views in order to profit or sell popular accounts to influencers later. I'd recommend primarily pursuing contracts with Amazon Prime or Netflix for independent films, rather than trying to battle YouTube because there is simply too much content ID activity on YouTube that is out of control, whereas on the alternate streaming services, they're geared more towards movies than to managing creator communities. If you are a film maker who needs music for a film project, contact music makers directly (producers that don't use samples in the work you need) in order to generate new, original, and exclusive music that they won't license or release anywhere else perhaps, make them sign a contract too... That might help in the future...?
- mysterydip 5y ago
  Not to take away from a very insightful comment, but can you share a link to the parrot video?
rexreed 5y ago
The smartest technologists and developers of our generation go to work for companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and others, and what we see are these results. Why can't we do better for everyone?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  There is no financial incentive to.
  - PeterCorless 5y ago
    There are HUGE financial incentives to ensuring that creators get paid for their work, and that consumers/users get the content they pay for, and that a channel can help negotiate content rights as intermediaries between creators and consumers. The problem is that we have taken stabs at this in the past, and they were too narrow-minded or draconian to take on. And some of the execs at these huge companies don't see the upside of facilitating this new marketplace of creation. It is literally a trillion dollar industry. But we are throwing really primitive "solutions" at the problem. See my post elsewhere in the thread as to what we need in 2021 and going forward.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      I don't disagree there are technically huge incentives to ensure everyone is paid what they're rightfully owed. But currently the problem is that in aggregate, it brings more money to rely on an overreaching algorithm (which is already built and paid-for) that favours big established labels as opposed to small-scale creators; the money they would spend on ensuring everyone gets paid fairly by building a better system wouldn't be recouped by the (relatively small) revenue they'd get from small-scale creators being able to participate. When I mentioned financial incentives, I didn't really mean incentives in terms of making more money - as per the above I don't think there is enough money to justify improving the current system. What I meant is that there should be more enforcement; what the current system does is actually committing copyright infringement by misattributing the revenue to the wrong creators, and if this was punished appropriately it would provide a financial incentive to resolve this problem.
paulpauper 5y ago
bring back pre-2014/2013 YouTube, back when people could unload content without as much fear of arbitrary take-downs or content violations warnings.
thrdbndndn 5y ago
"Guilty until proven innocent" is exactly how "DMCA safe harbor" is designed. Basically, YouTube as a content host, would actively, promptly and sometimes aggressively, respond to the "potential" copyright owner's requests, in exchange of keeping themselves away from lawsuit. This way, they don't need to pre-screen the content upon the uploading, because it's up to the copyright owner to find the illegal content and report (YouTube still do that in some degree with content-ID, though). There will be false-positives, there will be false claims, but they choose to play it safe. Just to make it clear: this whole system is fucked up, and how "aggressive" the host needs to be is a nuance that all parties involved will have dramatically different views. I just feel like lots of people don't understand the principle of DMCA safe harbor concept. It is the consequence of current copyright law; without it, user-generated content hosts can't survive the legal trouble (or they can, but would need significant more legal resources).
- slownews45 5y ago
  If you have the resources and the DMCA claim was false there are further opportunities to pursue a resolution. https://www.dmlp.org/threats/crook-v-10-zen-monkeys https://www.dmlp.org/threats/crook-v-10-zen-monkeys for an example
- wmf 5y ago
  DMCA lets you file a counter-notification if you're sure that you're right (I don't know why nobody ever does this) but YouTube Content ID is much worse.
  - ognarb 5y ago
    Also with a DMCA you can only take a video down, not take the ads-money instead. Content-ID creates very bad incentives.
  - retrocat 5y ago
    Because filing that counter-notice requires you to provide personal information, in case the person who filed the original DMCA wants to serve you with a legal notice. From https://www.copyright.gov/512/ https://www.copyright.gov/512/: > [...] To be effective, a counter-notice must contain substantially the following information: > (iv) the user’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
PeterCorless 5y ago
The problem with all of this is that there is no standard method to describe, assert, and validate digital rights as a technical grammar that is 1) computer parsable and 2) human interpretable. A long while ago, while back at Cisco, I suggested just such a grammar, called the Digital Rights Framework. It would be an inventory list embedded as data within a file, or an associated metadata file, that would clearly say "This is a unique name for a digital property with associated rights. This is my relationship towards the creator. These are the rights the creator gave me, or where I got a right from some authorized reseller of this digital property." Basically, we needed an industry standard for this kind of thing in the 1990s. Sadly, me and 10,000 of my closest friends got laid off back then. So all the work we were doing was scrapped (aside from getting a few patents around it). But the need for this sort of rights management and negotiation system has never lessened. Plus, it can't just be something that is done for one tech giant, and each tech giant does it differently. This needs to be a grammar as open as IETF standards, or W3C standards. Something that is extensible and customizable. Because then you'd be able to shove a list of your digital rights statements right in the face of someone who said you were violating copyright and tell them to shove it. Now, how you store and forward these rights is also up for debate. Do these need to be portable? Is this stored in a "wallet?" Or do these need to be accessible, and thus stored in a highly available or strongly consistent database? This is basically the nightmare I and others saw back in the 1990s that we simply never, as a collective tech industry, ever really addressed. It is literally a billion-dollar business for a trillion dollars of annual revenue if someone can figure out how to standardize this and make it simple and readily implementable.
- Accujack 5y ago
  The question is... would creating something like this cause an increase or decrease in the profits of large media corporations?
  - PeterCorless 5y ago
    Yes and yes. It would cause a net increase because there'd be a larger pie. But there would be fairer competition to the small players who literally have zero leverage now.
thriftwy 5y ago
Life is long, even when these fraudulent copyright owners are 90 years old, their grandchildren will still be footing these extremelly large, non-bancruptable fradulent copyright claim fines.
ARandumGuy 5y ago
YouTube seems to have three main priorities with their copyright system: 1) Eliminate legal liability and risk of lawsuits. Technically all they need to do is comply with DMCA requests, but YouTube would rather not be sued by a major record company or film studio, even if they could win the case. 2) Become friendly with major content creators (record and film labels, television studios). YouTube wants a good working relationship with these companies, to ensure that these companies post their content on YouTube. YouTube really wants the views they get by hosting SNL clips and Beyonce music videos. 3) Actually help the independent content creators deal with copyright claims. This is a very, very distant third. Because of these priorities, YouTube has decided their best course of action is to offload all of the work on copyright claims onto the independent content creators, in order to keep the big media giants happy. After all, NBC doesn't need YouTube, but a solo channel with 50k subscribers absolutely does.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  I think point 2 is actually quite important. YouTube used to be a source of genuinely innovative content. It is now far more corporate and anodyne, and the most popular videos are largely big production companies, and part of that is copy-striking. Ofc, the intention of copy-striking was not to decrease competition. But that ended up happening because of the way that the system is implemented (it isn't just copy-striking, I think reporting violations/automated violation systems have the same consequence).
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    Nonsense. Most of the videos on YouTube are still made by individual people. Just because there is now also corporate stuff on there doesn't mean you have to watch it. What do you want to do? Ban corporations from using YouTube? I don't think I'm subscribed to a single corporate channel out of about 100 subscriptions. * 3b1b * Matthias Wandel * Applied Science * Colin Furze * Scott Manley * Practical Engineering * Tom Scott * Tantacrul * CGP Grey * Forgotten Weapons * StuffMadeHere * John Heisz * Clickspring * Internet Historian ... YouTube is bursting at the seams with quality content made by individuals or tiny teams.
tombert 5y ago
I hate being "that guy", but isn't nearly every private corporation's policy "guilty until maybe proven innocent"? If Chuck E Cheese's get a report that I an punching children to death, they might preemptively disallow me in even if there's no evidence supporting that claim. If one of Best Buy's employees accused me of stealing Blu-Rays, they might not allow me into the store, even without any evidence. If I were a director and there was a rumor that my goal was to get Universal sued, they might not bring me on as a director. I'm not saying that this is should be how it is, and you could make a strong argument that it shouldn't be this way, but I think it predates YouTube.
- n8ta 5y ago
  Chuck E. is not the dominant platform for sharing video online. As the internet has replaced the town square people have come to expect a higher duty from the dominant internet companies than profit motive. The law hasn't kept pace with our expectations of these new quasi-public spaces.
  - tombert 5y ago
    But how exactly do we draw the line of what's acceptable with YouTube? Should YouTube be forced to host hardcore porn [1]? If not, why not? You could say "well anything that the FCC allows", but then that means we'd have to disallow most videos that have curse words in them (not to mention it would greatly reduce the appeal of YouTube for me, since part of why I like it is because it allows stuff that wouldn't be allowed on TV), but if you're saying that YouTube should be a free-speech zone, then how exactly is porn not protected speech? I'm not claiming I have the answer, but I feel that the vague "omg youtube is a platform so it should allow all my videos!!!!" argument is extremely reductive, and tends to imply that it should just be this total anarchy of a platform. If YouTube doesn't regulate their content, it's going to be hard to find advertisers, and if they can't find advertisers it will be hard to monetize the platform. [1] Obviously legal stuff, porn that's outright illegal should of course not be allowed.
  - theevilsharpie 5y ago
    An actual town square is a scarce resource (due to being a physical piece of real estate) that's usually managed by a municipality in a way that ensures fair access. Online video sites are in no way, shape, or form, a town square. They are privately-managed, there is no practical scarcity on how many video sites can exist, and if you don't like YouTube's policies, you and your viewers can easily go elsewhere. Indeed, platforms like BitChute exist in large part to host channels that YouTube has banned. By moving away from YouTube, you'd obviously lose YouTube's viewers and advertisers, and that may make your video channel infeasible if you're running it for-profit. But them's the breaks -- you're not entitled to another company's audience.
jimbob45 5y ago
The problem here is copyright duration being insanely long. Works from 1926 should not still be under copyright but they are. YouTube is just doing the best they can do within the confines of our ridiculous system. If copyright were only 20 years with an application to extend in special circumstances (equivalent to patent law), we wouldn't waste so much of our economic power devising and enforcing systems to uphold our archaic copyright laws.
javajosh 5y ago
The solution is simple: YouTube will become a media licensing marketplace! That way it knows for certain if you've broken the rules. Plus, it's a nice little side biz, to have de facto monopoly marketplace, enforced by the fear of BS infringement claims like these. It's a monopoly that's very hard to attack in court, because hey you're free to license content anyway you like! Litigation will take decades, and the customers can't afford litigation anyway, so let's do it!
- n8ta 5y ago
  I had this exact thought. It's obviously impossible for youtube to verify music was licensed since that licensing happens off platform. Clearly the next step is for them to vertically integrate and handle the licensing themselves.
- type0 5y ago
  Rumble had licensing as their business model for a long time now https://rumble.com/license-videos https://rumble.com/license-videos They are warming up to become a small competitor to youtube
thriftwy 5y ago
In fact, Twitch have very sensible approach here: it will mute any infringing material in replay. By taking this hard stance not providing the copyright owners with any way to monetize the material, Twitch discourages trolls from participating. Only a real content holder who is genuinely afraid of losses due to piracy, and is ready to spend resources on it despite no returns, will.
jrockway 5y ago
I am guessing that YouTube isn't the real problem here. If everyone self-hosted their videos, the first thing a media company would do is hire a bunch of programmers to crawl the internet, download the videos (probably in a buggy way costing you megabucks in transfer fees), scan the audio against my music library, and auto-send DMCA takedowns to the ISP that owns the IP address. If it was successful, I'd probably spin it off into its own company, and charge others to use it. Congratulations, you have Content ID! And Google already did this. I think that moving off YouTube would be the same story as other filesharing systems. Napster worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then (and my memory is foggy here) Limewire/Kazaa/etc. worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then public Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then private Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until someone accidentally invited the lawyers. That's exactly what would happen if everyone started hosting video files on their personal domains. It would work for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. (Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy.) Anyway, the problem is copyright law. Society would probably not implode if you said "movies and music are no longer copyrightable", and these probably would all go away overnight. What you'd see instead would be really competitive streaming services, and probably a lot of product placement in music and movies. (Except, you already see these things. This comment was sponsored by SquarespaceVPN! Sign up now with this offer code that I'm going to say is limited to the first 100 users but is actually unlimited because who is going to deny a customer? Also, did you know that Hacker News knows your username when you log in? Install our snakeoil VPN widget thing for only $34.99 per month and ... some security shit will happen to prevent that! Hackers! News! Scary!)
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy. They have it on their radar, but compared to torrents Usenet is so cumbersome to use it's definitely not a large enough market to waste resources on.
  - jrockway 5y ago
comeonseriously 5y ago
The automated beast that is Google strikes again. Why do business at all with robots? If you can't get someone on the phone, don't do business with that company.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > Why do business at all with robots? If you can't get someone on the phone, don't do business with that company. I was doing business with a company and signed a 20-year contract. At first, it was all humans. Then eventually there were fewer humans... then no longer anyone near me and I could only get business done over the phone. Then the phone people were replaced with an automated system for "nearly everything". I always wanted to speak to a representative though. Eventually even the way to speak to a representative was taken over and now they "schedule a call back". I don't receive phone calls. Too bad, I thought Aflac was an alright company. Unfortunately there are a lot of businesses that are leaning towards "schedule a callback". What comes after that is "chat online with a real person on our app". What comes after that? Maybe just "schedule a later chat with a real person" because their chat people are too busy and wait times are measured in hours. Then what? "Don't do business with robots" is well but it doesn't go far enough.
teddyh 5y ago
Jim Sterling has an… interesting… solution to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYinPJTxBNU#t=24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYinPJTxBNU#t=24s
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
onemoresoop 5y ago
They should charge litigators a fee that is non refundable for cases without merit. Problem solved.
imaginationra 5y ago
As an indie film/animation/game/music studio the only reason we see for still using youtube is for their free 4k video hosting/streaming. If you look around at the alternatives(Vimeo etc) it gets really expensive to host 4k video given the massive bandwidth. Youtube's overzealous content ID system should push studios etc to create their own original music. We have several original feature films on youtube with all original soundtracks and have no issues with flagging etc as none of our music has been sold to music licensors etc. Youtube's content ID system even goes after sound effect libraries- we had an issue in 2012 where our original animated feature film was flagged because of a wind sound effect that was 5 seconds long. It was an original sound that somehow matched a licensed wind sound. We disputed the wind ^_^ and the flagging/flogging was dropped. It might a drag to hear for studios not wanting to do the extra work but I think creating/hiring people to create all original material is the way to avoid such things on youtube. We think its better for culture as well.
- lifeplusplus 5y ago
  upload to cdn?
  - imaginationra 5y ago
    Which one would you recommend to host 2 hour long 4k videos? The videos themselves average around 40gb. I guess the Vimeo plan we would need is not so expensive $50/month. Do you know of a site that compares cdn hosting fees per gb etc?
    - xmaayy 5y ago
      Depends on the number of views you're expecting I suppose
squarefoot 5y ago
What would be the safest place to publish own music, or videos with own music, licensed as CC, that is, where copying is allowed from start, so that those trolls cannot claim any copyright violations? I may be interested in making some tech videos in the future, and I'd use exclusively my music, but have no intention of seeing it taken down or claimed as someone else's work. No problems if using a non mainstream platform would mean 100 viewers instead of 100.000; I don't plan to make a living with that and don't want to feed the Google trolls and their lawyers.
anilakar 5y ago
> The music was originally purchased under the title of Irish Reel from SmartSound. The identical track for which copyright is being claimed has been re-named Kilfenora Reels. Another huge issue that plagues ContentID is sample-based music. There is a huge number of pseudo-artists who license widely used sample packs, mash together songs with practically zero creative effort and then submit those songs to companies that register their clients' music to ContentID databases. When someone else uploads a song with the same (legally licensed!) samples in their composition to Youtube, it gets monetized with royalties going to the wrong person.
- ng12 5y ago
  One of my favorite YouTube videos is an audio recording of an extinct bird: https://youtu.be/nDRY0CmcYNU https://youtu.be/nDRY0CmcYNU Some shmuck sampled it in a piano composition and now is apparently getting royalties from the video. It really leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    I can't get your link to work, but which bird?
    - ng12 5y ago
      The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, native to Hawaii. It's the last known recording of it's song.
      - EdwardDiego 5y ago
        Thought it might have been, it sounds quite similar to some of our (NZ) birds - bellbirds,tui, kōkako. I didn't realise how recently it went extinct though, that's really sad. You might be interested in attempts to recreate calls of our extinct birds: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018694407/aotearoa-s-extinct-bird-calls https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audi...
einrealist 5y ago
There should be a certificate system for copyrighted stuff. Buying rights to music? You'll get a certificate along with the piece from the licensor. Upload the license(s) along with the video and the Content ID system could automatically do the check.
- jeffybefffy519 5y ago
  This is a brilliant idea
- EastOfTruth 5y ago
  NFT?
  - TheDong 5y ago
    Massively inefficient compared to something like the certificate authority system, and you could have a "certificate transparency log" like system if needed. You don't need a blockchain to do signatures or other cryptographic operations, and in fact the blockchain is the worst way to do it if you do not have adversaries trying to make double-spends. It's much harder to write correct code if you have to give equal power to all peers, while also trusting no-one. It's much easier to do what most systems do, which is trust every peer more or less (aka the SMTP style usual federation), or trust a small number of well-known supernodes (aka the CA system, the DNS system, the BGP system, etc). All of those systems for distributing information of various kinds are vastly easier to reason about, operate, etc, than blockchains.
- balls187 5y ago
  Who would ensure that the license holder has the rights to issue a cert? IIRC Getty Images was sued for allegedly claiming copyrights on images it did not actually have rights to.
  - einrealist 5y ago
    Youtube would need to trust Roots/Intermediates from license holders. Smaller license holders could get an Intermediate from a larger one, that is registered with YT.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
Is the term Butt Hurt still applicable for this?
csours 5y ago
Does YouTube have any system to manage positive rights clearing? YouTube has Hollywood movies available to buy or rent with copyrighted music, those movies have people on the production staff with the role to clear the rights to all the music. Surely those movies don't get takedown notices?
rossjudson 5y ago
Not surprised that few commenters here have read the linked article, or the comments at the end of it. This is essentially an attack on Smartsound, Shockwave-Sound, etc. It sounds like those companies want to after whoever is claiming copyright over their music.
throwaway14356 5y ago
make your own website. there is no choice really, you want full responsibility for what you do
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Never do a filter sweep on a synthesizer. For some reason, Youtube will slap you with a takedown as it thinks you're steeling off The Chemical Brothers.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  Wait really? Is there some technical explanation for this?
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    Not that I know of but I'd guess Youtube's fingerprinting is false positiving
0xebc 5y ago
"Their platform, their rules." Don't like it? Go host your videos somewhere else. You have no right to their private services.
KarlKemp 5y ago
Ah... bullshit. Copyright is civil law. There's no assumption of innocence in civil law. Fundamentally, because there's also no guilt, in the moral sense, only responsibilities and obligations. Practically, it's often a matter of chance which party is slightly faster and therefore plaintiff. If the other filing gets there first, you're the defendant. That's also why the standard of truth is just 50%+x, i. e. "preponderance of the evidence": it's the only standard that works in a symmetric situation. And, at the moment that YouTube takes down your video, the preponderance of the evidence is (sometimes just momentarily) against you, both statistically (most copyright complaints they process are legit) as well as philosophically, since there is only someone's affidavit that they own the copyright in the content, and no reply to it (yet). So, at that moment, YouTube doesn't start investigating because that would be a gigantic waste of resources, considering the uploader is in a far better position to disprove the claim. Forwarding the claim isn't YouTube siding with the accusation. It's them following the process the law set out (and, maybe, being slightly cheap). False takedown request are annoying, yes. They are also a few orders of magnitude rarer than copyright infringements, which I imagine would also tend to annoy some creators. And, crucially, they are the fault of the complainant. Doing anything creates the risk of idiots suing you without cause, and there's just no argument why YouTube should (or could) absorb that risk.
disple_acnt19 5y ago
The norm on these platforms seems to be this ancienty way of doing justice. Lest they take a risk to protect those who actually form the actual content, in fear of prosecution. My parents are operating an airbnb in their downstairs suite. A few months ago one of their visitors started complaining that they found hair under a heater behind a door, and dust behind the nightstand, and that this was making them uncomfortable and they would leave. To give some context, tens of rentals rentals in, they had an average cleanliness rating of 5/5. The guests stayed two nights, but then left and asked to be fully refunded (turns out there was a storm alert on Sunday that probably was the real cause for the premature departure). My parents refunded the cleaning as a gesture but declined to refund the rest given that it was obviously more of a personal choice than really an issue with cleanliness. The day after, airbnb locked their account and cancelled their reservations for the coming 2 months. An "anonymous guest" had made a safety complaint, that my parents had entered the suite or something like that. Airbnb never disclosed the details, but all the questions were around entering while the guests were in, which my parents were outraged they could be accused of. They had to plead their case that this wasn't right. Fortunately for them airbnb reinstated their account in a few days, but with those 2 months of bookings gone ; plus apparently a strike on their file and some employee telling them "never to do that again", despite not even knowing what the charge was. I scouted the net to advise them, and you can find countless stories of people getting their accounts closed by random guests making false accusations in an attempt to to get reimbursed for random stuff. My only advice was to diversify the platforms, but when the market is so dominated by a single actor, they can apply the ancient type of justice where you aren't allowed to face your accusers, or even know what you are accused of. The only thing you can do is pray that whomever "judges" your case didn't get blueballed the night before. I hope there will be a correction one day, but given the trend I am not hopeful. The future looks like for all sorts of things in our lives will be ruled and arbitrated by mini dictators ruling over their unregulated fiefdoms. I'm even posting this from a disposable account and altered the story in fear that somehow they might get identified and be targets of retribution.

469 points by relwin 5y ago

Alphabet is a pile of rancid shit run by morally bankrupt lunatics, and it is 100 times the problem Facebook ever dreamed of being, but we will never address this because the intelligentsia is full of brainwashed imbeciles who subsidize alphabet corporation in numerous ways including sending an army of insufferable hipster dumbfucks to upvote each other's posts about how acshually it's great that we live in a dystopia now.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ttctciyf 5y ago

In this version of the tragedy of the commons, the youtubers themselves are the resource headed for exhaustion. > the revised video had 5 new copyright claims even before upload processing was complete! Maybe there's an opportunity for an integrated offering of licensed music and lawyers to defend the licensee against bogus takedowns?

golemotron 5y ago
The fate of youtube has always been to become television. Countering the Tragedy of the Commons eventually raises the cost of creating and engaging with user-generated content relative to commercial content.
judge2020 5y ago
Those aren't claims, it's automatic Content ID. In this case YouTube has every right to prevent music from being uploaded and can prevent you from removing the Content ID claim, even when you have a license/it's in the public domain, because YT isn't abiding by or invoking the DMCA at all. It's like saying "guitar tryouts just don't play stairway to heaven" - you can forbid it even in the absence of AT&T sending a legal cease & desist your way.

bmitc 5y ago

It’s really scary what we’ve built on the Internet, and it’s even scarier that these corporations are able to go unchecked. Parts of life are already becoming miserable (e.g., automated “customer support”), and it’s just going to keep getting worse, all at the alter of growth and capitalism. I absolutely hate the argument used that scale prevents them to do anything about it, as if crimes en masse are suddenly okay. It’s their problem, not ours, that they’ve built systems that are, for all intents and purposes, uncontrollable. These corporations act like they are the victim in these cases of abuse of their platform.

rexreed 5y ago
I would venture that what we call capitalism these days isn't truly the capitalism of old. Rather, we're in some dystopian Corporatism future (corporatism vs capitalism) that aims to reduce choice, lock users in, and then treat those users as captive customers. It's no longer about providing a better or competitive product / service, but rather finding more ways to lock in users and eliminate choice. An acquisition by a FAANG is often a means to reduce choice instead of increase quality of a product or service.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  For over a hundred years people have described the tendency of a capitalist enterprise to concentrate wealth and power. There is no fine distinction between small diverse competitive capitalism and oligopoly, they are different stages of the life cycle. This is because small diverse enterprises proliferate at first in the growth stage and then winners start to emerge. When a crisis hits, the larger players snap up the bankrupt smaller players at bargain prices and get their best employees too. Over a series of crises, the market consolidates into oligopoly. Once the national market is nearly consumed, the remaining players look abroad to expand markets. There is nothing controversial about this, it is taught in business school. https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve This of course assumes a life cycle that starts domestically. Many ventures instead start abroad witnessing an opportunity to exploit cheap labor, lax regulations, or a unique natural resource. The western governments then assist the western companies in securing the opportunity, usually through gangster tactics. The resources are then extracted from the country, processed by the company into higher value goods, and resold to the originating country.

fencepost 5y ago

I do wonder if there's room for going after the people submitting false claims based on their libelous written claim to Google/YouTube that you're using unlicensed music. There's clearly a money trail to follow for identification.

winternett 5y ago
A lot of the time musicians sign themselves up to licensing services that create sub-agreements and some that don't even let the creators know that they have been licensed out to others. Then these artists stumble across their work in a project they didn't know about and report it out of confusion. There are also some gutless people out there who file the copyright claims for other negative purposes. Copyright has always been a huge mess though, and YouTube's method of making everyone compete for visibility certainly doesn't help it all. I only sign licensing agreements directly with the film makers I work with, and refuse to use 3rd party sites to handle my licensing in order to properly protect my work use rights though. The Internet can be a scary place to share personal work at times.
- fencepost 5y ago
  In a situation like that a strike should be retracted after more detail is provided - and if it's not, then you have a conflict between someone who's properly licensed music and someone claiming they haven't. Being able to determine whether it's licensed seems like a problem for the musician. Put differently, if the only practical difference between properly licensing and failing to properly license is that you pay extra for doing it right but get no benefit from doing so, then why bother licensing? If the punishment happens either way, might as well save the money and hassle up front. Regardless of that, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of predatory claimants out there who've found a low barrier to entry, enough payout to make the effort worthwhile, and little to no repercussions for fraudulent claims. THAT's the problem that really needs to be addressed.

noasaservice 5y ago

Or what Google could do is auto-identify music in videos (they do this), and then set up automated monthly payments to the appropriate ASCAP or similar licensing body for statutory payments. We already have statutory public performance prices. And we started to adhere to them, the creators could get their money, and the creators could further create content. (You know, like a content Ponzi scheme.)

hateful 5y ago
Right? You upload and it says "this will cost $n per month to host it and you'll be charged starting next month via one of a few licensees you can select OR you can put in an existing license claim." Maybe each license can come with a UniqueId that you can fill in and it checks with an authority automatically.
- noasaservice 5y ago
  Having done ASCAP fee schedules, the fees would be based on the amount of plays you've done. And you can pay per month, quarter, or estimated listeners in your area (for things like radio and broadcast). This is *simple*, and stays completely above ground with respect to copyright and mechanical reproductions. And it also allows the creators remixing content to ALSO make money. The hardest part is the ContentID that google already has. So it'd be keeping track of copyright owners, and paying. Sure, non-monetized videos would have to pay to keep them up. That could be a bummer... But it could be a definite choice to do. Monetized videos could just be paid directly out of the monetization bucket.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  And get this, you can host our ads in your product and select where they’ll be played. Any revenue generated from our ads will be passed on to you, less our commission!
inetsee 5y ago
Or Google could go to some effort to identify the individuals who are making a large number of false takedown claims, and block them from making claims?

jasode 5y ago

>From now on I will stay 100% with Vimeo but, as we know, they have a fraction of the viewership of You Tube – primarily because so few people know they even exist. Websurfer awareness is not the primary reason Vimeo has less viewership. The cause & effect before the buildup of awareness is the incentives that prevent content creators to upload videos to Vimeo in the first place: - platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads) - no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization without content creators asking audiences to pay for subscriptions. This financial model covers a wide variety of videos especially for unknown creators. The financial model of Vimeo is fine but its inherent costs will keep it smaller than Youtube because both the uploaders and the viewers don't want to pay. [1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade https://vimeo.com/upgrade

stefan_ 5y ago
The biggest of all being that Vimeo has essentially no discovery system? To a viewer, Vimeo is just a crude way to host a video.
- amelius 5y ago
  As a viewer I want my discovery algorithm decoupled from who hosts my videos.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    The problem with that for creators is the information on who is watching what gets much poorer when that happens so the algorithm has much less to go off of so no one has really done it. Also how do you monetize that? The host will be the one inserting ads.
  - MikeTheGreat 5y ago
    Can I ask how that would work? Like, are you saying that you'd rather use Google to search for content (including videos) and then find the videos on whichever web site hosts that individual video? I do enjoy listening to music on YouTube and I actually like that it'll auto-enqueue music to play next that's similar to what I'm listening to now. You idea (I think) is really interesting - it's been a while since the web has worked that way and it's interesting to think about how combined hosting+discovery has changed it from the 'early days'

winternett 5y ago

As a music producer myself who makes music for film, I haven't had too many problems with use of my music in the work I do despite being distributed on all the usual major platforms. This is usually because content ID on YouTube gives credits and royalties to the original music creators, and most of my (remixed) uploads are not monetized once I publish them on YT. My distributer handles royalties for my all original music and pays me based on streams. I also make more money off spotify than YouTube even though I've been on YouTube for a lot longer than on Spotify... Overall though, the best comes from licensing my music in films outside of Internet platforms. I gave up caring long ago about gaining money from views, my most profitable upload was in 2015 when I filmed my parrot falling off my kitchen counter... That video likely succeeded because it wasn't something that would provide me residual success that overshadowed YouTube's normal (controlled) revenue pipelines. I do however mysteriously get my own music blocked frequently on uploads to TikTok, and there is only complete and demoralizing frustration in trying to report the issue, because they don't care about small creators like me because we don't make them enough money probably.... TikTok and many social platforms keep support only as an afterthought, and finding the right place to get problems solved on most platforms is damn near impossible. The social media creator economy is dismal and highly competitive for musicians and film makers right now. One of the biggest copyright issues is people who completely hijack and fake "original content" as their own in order to get views in order to profit or sell popular accounts to influencers later. I'd recommend primarily pursuing contracts with Amazon Prime or Netflix for independent films, rather than trying to battle YouTube because there is simply too much content ID activity on YouTube that is out of control, whereas on the alternate streaming services, they're geared more towards movies than to managing creator communities. If you are a film maker who needs music for a film project, contact music makers directly (producers that don't use samples in the work you need) in order to generate new, original, and exclusive music that they won't license or release anywhere else perhaps, make them sign a contract too... That might help in the future...?

mysterydip 5y ago
Not to take away from a very insightful comment, but can you share a link to the parrot video?

rexreed 5y ago

The smartest technologists and developers of our generation go to work for companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and others, and what we see are these results. Why can't we do better for everyone?

Nextgrid 5y ago
There is no financial incentive to.
- PeterCorless 5y ago
  There are HUGE financial incentives to ensuring that creators get paid for their work, and that consumers/users get the content they pay for, and that a channel can help negotiate content rights as intermediaries between creators and consumers. The problem is that we have taken stabs at this in the past, and they were too narrow-minded or draconian to take on. And some of the execs at these huge companies don't see the upside of facilitating this new marketplace of creation. It is literally a trillion dollar industry. But we are throwing really primitive "solutions" at the problem. See my post elsewhere in the thread as to what we need in 2021 and going forward.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I don't disagree there are technically huge incentives to ensure everyone is paid what they're rightfully owed. But currently the problem is that in aggregate, it brings more money to rely on an overreaching algorithm (which is already built and paid-for) that favours big established labels as opposed to small-scale creators; the money they would spend on ensuring everyone gets paid fairly by building a better system wouldn't be recouped by the (relatively small) revenue they'd get from small-scale creators being able to participate. When I mentioned financial incentives, I didn't really mean incentives in terms of making more money - as per the above I don't think there is enough money to justify improving the current system. What I meant is that there should be more enforcement; what the current system does is actually committing copyright infringement by misattributing the revenue to the wrong creators, and if this was punished appropriately it would provide a financial incentive to resolve this problem.

paulpauper 5y ago

bring back pre-2014/2013 YouTube, back when people could unload content without as much fear of arbitrary take-downs or content violations warnings.

thrdbndndn 5y ago

"Guilty until proven innocent" is exactly how "DMCA safe harbor" is designed. Basically, YouTube as a content host, would actively, promptly and sometimes aggressively, respond to the "potential" copyright owner's requests, in exchange of keeping themselves away from lawsuit. This way, they don't need to pre-screen the content upon the uploading, because it's up to the copyright owner to find the illegal content and report (YouTube still do that in some degree with content-ID, though). There will be false-positives, there will be false claims, but they choose to play it safe. Just to make it clear: this whole system is fucked up, and how "aggressive" the host needs to be is a nuance that all parties involved will have dramatically different views. I just feel like lots of people don't understand the principle of DMCA safe harbor concept. It is the consequence of current copyright law; without it, user-generated content hosts can't survive the legal trouble (or they can, but would need significant more legal resources).

slownews45 5y ago
If you have the resources and the DMCA claim was false there are further opportunities to pursue a resolution. https://www.dmlp.org/threats/crook-v-10-zen-monkeys https://www.dmlp.org/threats/crook-v-10-zen-monkeys for an example
wmf 5y ago
DMCA lets you file a counter-notification if you're sure that you're right (I don't know why nobody ever does this) but YouTube Content ID is much worse.
- ognarb 5y ago
  Also with a DMCA you can only take a video down, not take the ads-money instead. Content-ID creates very bad incentives.
- retrocat 5y ago
  Because filing that counter-notice requires you to provide personal information, in case the person who filed the original DMCA wants to serve you with a legal notice. From https://www.copyright.gov/512/ https://www.copyright.gov/512/: > [...] To be effective, a counter-notice must contain substantially the following information: > (iv) the user’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.

PeterCorless 5y ago

The problem with all of this is that there is no standard method to describe, assert, and validate digital rights as a technical grammar that is 1) computer parsable and 2) human interpretable. A long while ago, while back at Cisco, I suggested just such a grammar, called the Digital Rights Framework. It would be an inventory list embedded as data within a file, or an associated metadata file, that would clearly say "This is a unique name for a digital property with associated rights. This is my relationship towards the creator. These are the rights the creator gave me, or where I got a right from some authorized reseller of this digital property." Basically, we needed an industry standard for this kind of thing in the 1990s. Sadly, me and 10,000 of my closest friends got laid off back then. So all the work we were doing was scrapped (aside from getting a few patents around it). But the need for this sort of rights management and negotiation system has never lessened. Plus, it can't just be something that is done for one tech giant, and each tech giant does it differently. This needs to be a grammar as open as IETF standards, or W3C standards. Something that is extensible and customizable. Because then you'd be able to shove a list of your digital rights statements right in the face of someone who said you were violating copyright and tell them to shove it. Now, how you store and forward these rights is also up for debate. Do these need to be portable? Is this stored in a "wallet?" Or do these need to be accessible, and thus stored in a highly available or strongly consistent database? This is basically the nightmare I and others saw back in the 1990s that we simply never, as a collective tech industry, ever really addressed. It is literally a billion-dollar business for a trillion dollars of annual revenue if someone can figure out how to standardize this and make it simple and readily implementable.

Accujack 5y ago
The question is... would creating something like this cause an increase or decrease in the profits of large media corporations?
- PeterCorless 5y ago
  Yes and yes. It would cause a net increase because there'd be a larger pie. But there would be fairer competition to the small players who literally have zero leverage now.

thriftwy 5y ago

Life is long, even when these fraudulent copyright owners are 90 years old, their grandchildren will still be footing these extremelly large, non-bancruptable fradulent copyright claim fines.

ARandumGuy 5y ago

YouTube seems to have three main priorities with their copyright system: 1) Eliminate legal liability and risk of lawsuits. Technically all they need to do is comply with DMCA requests, but YouTube would rather not be sued by a major record company or film studio, even if they could win the case. 2) Become friendly with major content creators (record and film labels, television studios). YouTube wants a good working relationship with these companies, to ensure that these companies post their content on YouTube. YouTube really wants the views they get by hosting SNL clips and Beyonce music videos. 3) Actually help the independent content creators deal with copyright claims. This is a very, very distant third. Because of these priorities, YouTube has decided their best course of action is to offload all of the work on copyright claims onto the independent content creators, in order to keep the big media giants happy. After all, NBC doesn't need YouTube, but a solo channel with 50k subscribers absolutely does.

hogFeast 5y ago
I think point 2 is actually quite important. YouTube used to be a source of genuinely innovative content. It is now far more corporate and anodyne, and the most popular videos are largely big production companies, and part of that is copy-striking. Ofc, the intention of copy-striking was not to decrease competition. But that ended up happening because of the way that the system is implemented (it isn't just copy-striking, I think reporting violations/automated violation systems have the same consequence).
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Nonsense. Most of the videos on YouTube are still made by individual people. Just because there is now also corporate stuff on there doesn't mean you have to watch it. What do you want to do? Ban corporations from using YouTube? I don't think I'm subscribed to a single corporate channel out of about 100 subscriptions. * 3b1b * Matthias Wandel * Applied Science * Colin Furze * Scott Manley * Practical Engineering * Tom Scott * Tantacrul * CGP Grey * Forgotten Weapons * StuffMadeHere * John Heisz * Clickspring * Internet Historian ... YouTube is bursting at the seams with quality content made by individuals or tiny teams.

tombert 5y ago

I hate being "that guy", but isn't nearly every private corporation's policy "guilty until maybe proven innocent"? If Chuck E Cheese's get a report that I an punching children to death, they might preemptively disallow me in even if there's no evidence supporting that claim. If one of Best Buy's employees accused me of stealing Blu-Rays, they might not allow me into the store, even without any evidence. If I were a director and there was a rumor that my goal was to get Universal sued, they might not bring me on as a director. I'm not saying that this is should be how it is, and you could make a strong argument that it shouldn't be this way, but I think it predates YouTube.

n8ta 5y ago
Chuck E. is not the dominant platform for sharing video online. As the internet has replaced the town square people have come to expect a higher duty from the dominant internet companies than profit motive. The law hasn't kept pace with our expectations of these new quasi-public spaces.
- tombert 5y ago
  But how exactly do we draw the line of what's acceptable with YouTube? Should YouTube be forced to host hardcore porn [1]? If not, why not? You could say "well anything that the FCC allows", but then that means we'd have to disallow most videos that have curse words in them (not to mention it would greatly reduce the appeal of YouTube for me, since part of why I like it is because it allows stuff that wouldn't be allowed on TV), but if you're saying that YouTube should be a free-speech zone, then how exactly is porn not protected speech? I'm not claiming I have the answer, but I feel that the vague "omg youtube is a platform so it should allow all my videos!!!!" argument is extremely reductive, and tends to imply that it should just be this total anarchy of a platform. If YouTube doesn't regulate their content, it's going to be hard to find advertisers, and if they can't find advertisers it will be hard to monetize the platform. [1] Obviously legal stuff, porn that's outright illegal should of course not be allowed.
- theevilsharpie 5y ago
  An actual town square is a scarce resource (due to being a physical piece of real estate) that's usually managed by a municipality in a way that ensures fair access. Online video sites are in no way, shape, or form, a town square. They are privately-managed, there is no practical scarcity on how many video sites can exist, and if you don't like YouTube's policies, you and your viewers can easily go elsewhere. Indeed, platforms like BitChute exist in large part to host channels that YouTube has banned. By moving away from YouTube, you'd obviously lose YouTube's viewers and advertisers, and that may make your video channel infeasible if you're running it for-profit. But them's the breaks -- you're not entitled to another company's audience.

jimbob45 5y ago

The problem here is copyright duration being insanely long. Works from 1926 should not still be under copyright but they are. YouTube is just doing the best they can do within the confines of our ridiculous system. If copyright were only 20 years with an application to extend in special circumstances (equivalent to patent law), we wouldn't waste so much of our economic power devising and enforcing systems to uphold our archaic copyright laws.

javajosh 5y ago

The solution is simple: YouTube will become a media licensing marketplace! That way it knows for certain if you've broken the rules. Plus, it's a nice little side biz, to have de facto monopoly marketplace, enforced by the fear of BS infringement claims like these. It's a monopoly that's very hard to attack in court, because hey you're free to license content anyway you like! Litigation will take decades, and the customers can't afford litigation anyway, so let's do it!

n8ta 5y ago
I had this exact thought. It's obviously impossible for youtube to verify music was licensed since that licensing happens off platform. Clearly the next step is for them to vertically integrate and handle the licensing themselves.
type0 5y ago
Rumble had licensing as their business model for a long time now https://rumble.com/license-videos https://rumble.com/license-videos They are warming up to become a small competitor to youtube

thriftwy 5y ago

In fact, Twitch have very sensible approach here: it will mute any infringing material in replay. By taking this hard stance not providing the copyright owners with any way to monetize the material, Twitch discourages trolls from participating. Only a real content holder who is genuinely afraid of losses due to piracy, and is ready to spend resources on it despite no returns, will.

jrockway 5y ago

I am guessing that YouTube isn't the real problem here. If everyone self-hosted their videos, the first thing a media company would do is hire a bunch of programmers to crawl the internet, download the videos (probably in a buggy way costing you megabucks in transfer fees), scan the audio against my music library, and auto-send DMCA takedowns to the ISP that owns the IP address. If it was successful, I'd probably spin it off into its own company, and charge others to use it. Congratulations, you have Content ID! And Google already did this. I think that moving off YouTube would be the same story as other filesharing systems. Napster worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then (and my memory is foggy here) Limewire/Kazaa/etc. worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then public Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then private Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until someone accidentally invited the lawyers. That's exactly what would happen if everyone started hosting video files on their personal domains. It would work for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. (Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy.) Anyway, the problem is copyright law. Society would probably not implode if you said "movies and music are no longer copyrightable", and these probably would all go away overnight. What you'd see instead would be really competitive streaming services, and probably a lot of product placement in music and movies. (Except, you already see these things. This comment was sponsored by SquarespaceVPN! Sign up now with this offer code that I'm going to say is limited to the first 100 users but is actually unlimited because who is going to deny a customer? Also, did you know that Hacker News knows your username when you log in? Install our snakeoil VPN widget thing for only $34.99 per month and ... some security shit will happen to prevent that! Hackers! News! Scary!)

mschuster91 5y ago
> Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy. They have it on their radar, but compared to torrents Usenet is so cumbersome to use it's definitely not a large enough market to waste resources on.
- jrockway 5y ago

comeonseriously 5y ago

The automated beast that is Google strikes again. Why do business at all with robots? If you can't get someone on the phone, don't do business with that company.

inetknght 5y ago
> Why do business at all with robots? If you can't get someone on the phone, don't do business with that company. I was doing business with a company and signed a 20-year contract. At first, it was all humans. Then eventually there were fewer humans... then no longer anyone near me and I could only get business done over the phone. Then the phone people were replaced with an automated system for "nearly everything". I always wanted to speak to a representative though. Eventually even the way to speak to a representative was taken over and now they "schedule a call back". I don't receive phone calls. Too bad, I thought Aflac was an alright company. Unfortunately there are a lot of businesses that are leaning towards "schedule a callback". What comes after that is "chat online with a real person on our app". What comes after that? Maybe just "schedule a later chat with a real person" because their chat people are too busy and wait times are measured in hours. Then what? "Don't do business with robots" is well but it doesn't go far enough.

teddyh 5y ago

Jim Sterling has an… interesting… solution to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYinPJTxBNU#t=24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYinPJTxBNU#t=24s

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

onemoresoop 5y ago

They should charge litigators a fee that is non refundable for cases without merit. Problem solved.

imaginationra 5y ago

As an indie film/animation/game/music studio the only reason we see for still using youtube is for their free 4k video hosting/streaming. If you look around at the alternatives(Vimeo etc) it gets really expensive to host 4k video given the massive bandwidth. Youtube's overzealous content ID system should push studios etc to create their own original music. We have several original feature films on youtube with all original soundtracks and have no issues with flagging etc as none of our music has been sold to music licensors etc. Youtube's content ID system even goes after sound effect libraries- we had an issue in 2012 where our original animated feature film was flagged because of a wind sound effect that was 5 seconds long. It was an original sound that somehow matched a licensed wind sound. We disputed the wind ^_^ and the flagging/flogging was dropped. It might a drag to hear for studios not wanting to do the extra work but I think creating/hiring people to create all original material is the way to avoid such things on youtube. We think its better for culture as well.

lifeplusplus 5y ago
upload to cdn?
- imaginationra 5y ago
  Which one would you recommend to host 2 hour long 4k videos? The videos themselves average around 40gb. I guess the Vimeo plan we would need is not so expensive $50/month. Do you know of a site that compares cdn hosting fees per gb etc?
  - xmaayy 5y ago
    Depends on the number of views you're expecting I suppose

squarefoot 5y ago

What would be the safest place to publish own music, or videos with own music, licensed as CC, that is, where copying is allowed from start, so that those trolls cannot claim any copyright violations? I may be interested in making some tech videos in the future, and I'd use exclusively my music, but have no intention of seeing it taken down or claimed as someone else's work. No problems if using a non mainstream platform would mean 100 viewers instead of 100.000; I don't plan to make a living with that and don't want to feed the Google trolls and their lawyers.

anilakar 5y ago

> The music was originally purchased under the title of Irish Reel from SmartSound. The identical track for which copyright is being claimed has been re-named Kilfenora Reels. Another huge issue that plagues ContentID is sample-based music. There is a huge number of pseudo-artists who license widely used sample packs, mash together songs with practically zero creative effort and then submit those songs to companies that register their clients' music to ContentID databases. When someone else uploads a song with the same (legally licensed!) samples in their composition to Youtube, it gets monetized with royalties going to the wrong person.

ng12 5y ago
One of my favorite YouTube videos is an audio recording of an extinct bird: https://youtu.be/nDRY0CmcYNU https://youtu.be/nDRY0CmcYNU Some shmuck sampled it in a piano composition and now is apparently getting royalties from the video. It really leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  I can't get your link to work, but which bird?
  - ng12 5y ago
    The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, native to Hawaii. It's the last known recording of it's song.
    - EdwardDiego 5y ago
      Thought it might have been, it sounds quite similar to some of our (NZ) birds - bellbirds,tui, kōkako. I didn't realise how recently it went extinct though, that's really sad. You might be interested in attempts to recreate calls of our extinct birds: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018694407/aotearoa-s-extinct-bird-calls https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audi...

einrealist 5y ago

There should be a certificate system for copyrighted stuff. Buying rights to music? You'll get a certificate along with the piece from the licensor. Upload the license(s) along with the video and the Content ID system could automatically do the check.

jeffybefffy519 5y ago
This is a brilliant idea
EastOfTruth 5y ago
NFT?
- TheDong 5y ago
  Massively inefficient compared to something like the certificate authority system, and you could have a "certificate transparency log" like system if needed. You don't need a blockchain to do signatures or other cryptographic operations, and in fact the blockchain is the worst way to do it if you do not have adversaries trying to make double-spends. It's much harder to write correct code if you have to give equal power to all peers, while also trusting no-one. It's much easier to do what most systems do, which is trust every peer more or less (aka the SMTP style usual federation), or trust a small number of well-known supernodes (aka the CA system, the DNS system, the BGP system, etc). All of those systems for distributing information of various kinds are vastly easier to reason about, operate, etc, than blockchains.
balls187 5y ago
Who would ensure that the license holder has the rights to issue a cert? IIRC Getty Images was sued for allegedly claiming copyrights on images it did not actually have rights to.
- einrealist 5y ago
  Youtube would need to trust Roots/Intermediates from license holders. Smaller license holders could get an Intermediate from a larger one, that is registered with YT.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

Is the term Butt Hurt still applicable for this?

csours 5y ago

Does YouTube have any system to manage positive rights clearing? YouTube has Hollywood movies available to buy or rent with copyrighted music, those movies have people on the production staff with the role to clear the rights to all the music. Surely those movies don't get takedown notices?

rossjudson 5y ago

Not surprised that few commenters here have read the linked article, or the comments at the end of it. This is essentially an attack on Smartsound, Shockwave-Sound, etc. It sounds like those companies want to after whoever is claiming copyright over their music.

throwaway14356 5y ago

make your own website. there is no choice really, you want full responsibility for what you do

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

Never do a filter sweep on a synthesizer. For some reason, Youtube will slap you with a takedown as it thinks you're steeling off The Chemical Brothers.

wildrhythms 5y ago
Wait really? Is there some technical explanation for this?
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Not that I know of but I'd guess Youtube's fingerprinting is false positiving

0xebc 5y ago

"Their platform, their rules." Don't like it? Go host your videos somewhere else. You have no right to their private services.

KarlKemp 5y ago

Ah... bullshit. Copyright is civil law. There's no assumption of innocence in civil law. Fundamentally, because there's also no guilt, in the moral sense, only responsibilities and obligations. Practically, it's often a matter of chance which party is slightly faster and therefore plaintiff. If the other filing gets there first, you're the defendant. That's also why the standard of truth is just 50%+x, i. e. "preponderance of the evidence": it's the only standard that works in a symmetric situation. And, at the moment that YouTube takes down your video, the preponderance of the evidence is (sometimes just momentarily) against you, both statistically (most copyright complaints they process are legit) as well as philosophically, since there is only someone's affidavit that they own the copyright in the content, and no reply to it (yet). So, at that moment, YouTube doesn't start investigating because that would be a gigantic waste of resources, considering the uploader is in a far better position to disprove the claim. Forwarding the claim isn't YouTube siding with the accusation. It's them following the process the law set out (and, maybe, being slightly cheap). False takedown request are annoying, yes. They are also a few orders of magnitude rarer than copyright infringements, which I imagine would also tend to annoy some creators. And, crucially, they are the fault of the complainant. Doing anything creates the risk of idiots suing you without cause, and there's just no argument why YouTube should (or could) absorb that risk.

disple_acnt19 5y ago

The norm on these platforms seems to be this ancienty way of doing justice. Lest they take a risk to protect those who actually form the actual content, in fear of prosecution. My parents are operating an airbnb in their downstairs suite. A few months ago one of their visitors started complaining that they found hair under a heater behind a door, and dust behind the nightstand, and that this was making them uncomfortable and they would leave. To give some context, tens of rentals rentals in, they had an average cleanliness rating of 5/5. The guests stayed two nights, but then left and asked to be fully refunded (turns out there was a storm alert on Sunday that probably was the real cause for the premature departure). My parents refunded the cleaning as a gesture but declined to refund the rest given that it was obviously more of a personal choice than really an issue with cleanliness. The day after, airbnb locked their account and cancelled their reservations for the coming 2 months. An "anonymous guest" had made a safety complaint, that my parents had entered the suite or something like that. Airbnb never disclosed the details, but all the questions were around entering while the guests were in, which my parents were outraged they could be accused of. They had to plead their case that this wasn't right. Fortunately for them airbnb reinstated their account in a few days, but with those 2 months of bookings gone ; plus apparently a strike on their file and some employee telling them "never to do that again", despite not even knowing what the charge was. I scouted the net to advise them, and you can find countless stories of people getting their accounts closed by random guests making false accusations in an attempt to to get reimbursed for random stuff. My only advice was to diversify the platforms, but when the market is so dominated by a single actor, they can apply the ancient type of justice where you aren't allowed to face your accusers, or even know what you are accused of. The only thing you can do is pray that whomever "judges" your case didn't get blueballed the night before. I hope there will be a correction one day, but given the trend I am not hopeful. The future looks like for all sorts of things in our lives will be ruled and arbitrated by mini dictators ruling over their unregulated fiefdoms. I'm even posting this from a disposable account and altered the story in fear that somehow they might get identified and be targets of retribution.